For the moment
then, the crisis seemed to have receded. Nevertheless, the episode refreshed my
memory over two earlier episodes involving holidays. One is an event that lies
within the public domain, the other a personal memory that I would like to
share and reflect on.

The first episode
dates back a number of years, when the government of the then Chief Minister of
Goa, Manohar Parrikar, contemplated withdrawing the public holidays on the Good
Friday and the feast of St. Francis Xavier. As can be expected, there was a hue
and cry then too, until this controversial move was undone, with Parrikar later suggesting that the move had been an error.

The second
episode dates from the time when I was working with an NGO in Hyderabad. I
realised with some shock that this corporate-funded entity had not declared Eid
(I forget which of the two Eids it was) a holiday. On the contrary, it was
marked as an optional holiday. If one chose, for religious reasons, one could
take the day off, but the rest of the office would continue working. I also
recall being told that one could take the day off, but I would be merely eating
into my own stock of optional holidays. I recollect sensing the suggestion of
the threat that I would be compromising my days of Christian celebration were I
to take the day off to commemorate the feast.

I was quite
upset by this scenario. I had recently returned from Patna where I had a number
of Muslim friends and had been sucked into a series of Eids, weddings, and
other celebrations. Even though I was bereft of this network in Hyderabad, I could
not contemplate an Eid that was to be spent working, instead of feasting with
friends. It hurt, but rather than create trouble and stand up for a principle I
was not yet sure of, I went to work that Eid day, mournfully walking past
masses of men praying at the mosques along the route I took to work.

These memories
were swirling around my head these past couple of days I realised that the
issue of cancelling holidays, or restricting these holidays is much more
important than showing disrespect or disregard for religious minorities. On the
contrary, such governmental actions ensure that religious boundaries are
hardened and religions are formed into water tight compartments. The learning
from Hyderabad was just that, you can choose to be a Catholic and take your
holiday, or you can choose to show solidarity with Muslims. We are not
preventing you from celebrating Eid, but you need to make a choice. Similarly,
had the feast of St. Francis Xavier continued to have lost its holiday, a great
number of Catholics would have still taken the day off to visit Old Goa and
venerate the relics of the saint. This option would perhaps not have been so
definite for those Goans who are not practicing Catholics but still venerate
St. Francis Xavier. It is possible that they would have continued with their
daily routines. Similarly had the holiday on Good Friday been cancelled it
would not only have complicated the possibility of having clear roads for the
public processions that mark Good Friday, it would also have complicated the
participation of non-Catholics, who light up the streets, and offer incense to
perfume the funeral path of Christ.

We must remember that we live in an
environment where thanks to the threat of an aggressive Hindu nationalism, all
religious groups have been hardening their identities and castigating what are
called syncretic practices. When a government restricts a holiday, therefore, or
fails to provide one, it is lending its own strength against these already
existent social pressures. The issue of cancelling holidays therefore does not
merely impact on the group for whom it is most significant. It impacts all,
preventing communal celebrations, visits, exchange of sweets. It goes towards
creating a fractured society.

It is in this
context that we should evaluate the clarifications of Smriti Irani, Minister
for Human Resources Development, on the issue of celebration of ‘Good
Governance’ day, as well as the subsequent note from the Prime Minister’s
Office that mandated various officers to mark ‘Good Governance’ day. What is clear is that rather than let Christmas
day be, the Central Government has identified the twenty-fifth of December as
the day to commemorate ‘Good Governance’ day. The essay competition will
continue apace even though the event will be restricted to submissions over the
internet. Further, various officers of the Government were expected to attend
and conduct commemorations linked to the theme of good governance.

What this
effectively amounts to is providing an alternative to the celebrations of
Christmas that have become a major feature across India. One does not need to
be Christian, nor indeed have Christian friends to celebrate the day. Regardless of their religious persuasion, people engage in secular celebrations of this feast by organising Christmas
parties, arranging visits from Santa Claus and the like. The fact is that thanks
to a variety of factors, a number of Indians, and especially urban and upwardly
mobile Indians are ‘culturally Christian’. They have imbibed many Christian
and/or western cultural traditions and celebrate them as if these traditions
are their own. That these aspects are not strictly religious is not important,
it is in fact exactly the point, that the festival has ceased to be religious
alone, but is a cross-communal secular festival. Indeed, if one is to take the
historical novel, The Mirror of Beauty
seriously, Christmas, or Bada Din was a significant festival in Delhi by the time of the last Mughal emperor, and
avidly celebrated by the Mughal elites.

Given the kind
of pressure that Indian society places on students to excel and gain laurels,
one can imagine that children would be encouraged, if not pressured, to take
part in a national competition that could get them national recognition.
Remember we live in a country where even a certificate of participation is
regarded as useful. As such, having a competition at the time of the Christmas
holidays, with a submission on Christmas day, no matter that the submission can
be made virtually, ensures that one has created a substantial diversion from
the pleasures, and significance, of Christmas. In addition to these competitions,
the low-key government commemorations of good governance that continued even while the holiday was still officially on clearly indicate that
the conspiracy to steal Christmas is, therefore, still on.

It should be
noted, however, that it is not only the BJP government that is engaged in a
project that dismisses Christmas. A variety of organisations in India,
including academic and non-governmental, as well as those patronised by the
nominally secular-liberals think nothing of hosting significant retreats
immediately prior to, or soon after Christmas day. This scheduling ensures that
very often Christians have to either opt out of Christmas, or the event, or
spend a good part of Christmas day in travel. And, as I pointed out earlier,
this callous scheduling does not impact Christians alone, but fractures the
possibility of non-Christians in participating in what is a wonderful feast of
familial gathering. The loss is communal.

We live in a
country where the plethora of holidays we enjoy is often castigated. Over the
year these holidays have been vilified merely as days free from work. What this
vilification does not recognise is that holidays are a way for us to indicate
that an event is important enough for us to take time off work and engage with
each other. Even if we choose to not engage with other communities, the holiday
continues to be a mark that this other community is important. It is this
tradition of honouring those who are unlike us that is at stake when holidays
are so callously countermanded.

Feliz Natal! Have a blessed and joyous
Christmas season!

(A version of this text was first published in the O Heraldo dated 26 Dec 2014)

Friday, December 12, 2014

The two lectures
and accompanying discussions held in Goa recently under the aegis of the Dr.
Ambedkar Memorial Lecture Series provided much needed food for thought and
discussion.Organised to proffer
Ambedkarite visions on issues that are of concern to the country, the lectures
featured Dr. Varsha Ayyar from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay, and
the acclaimed Dalit intellectual Chandrabhan Prasad.

Chandrabhan
Prasad spoke on ‘Ambedkar’s India Project’ suggesting that Ambedkar had a
definite vision for India, one that was not tied to any one dogma, but one that
was committed to destroying the caste system and creating an Indian society
that would be more respectful of all. A part of this project relied on the
industrialisation and mechanisation of agriculture. Once people have access to
machines, Prasad argued, all kind of jobs are open to people irrespective of
caste. He provided the example of sanitation services in high-end hotels.
Labelled more appealingly as “Housecleaning” and with provisions for gloves,
uniforms and tools, these jobs that would normally be reserved for dalits had now
seen the entry of dominant caste persons.

Prasad is
perhaps more famous for his support of school education in English, going so
far as to propose a temple for the goddess that is the English language, and the
celebration of Macaulay’s birthday. Given that he did not touch directly on
this more controversial topic, I ventured a question: In the context of Goa,
where those who argue for English as a state-supported medium of instruction
are berated as anti-national, denationalised and against Indian culture, what
would your response be?

Prasad’s
response was crystal clear. What is this Indian or vernacular culture that
these anti-English educationists seek to promote? It is the very culture that
oppresses Dalits and other marginalised communities in the country. This is a
culture that embodies caste. If this culture will be destroyed in the process of
education in English, then let it be destroyed.

Prasad’s logic
recognises that language does not necessarily come alone, it is often
accompanied by a culture. Prasad avers that the culture that comes along with
English is largely an egalitarian culture and should be welcomed. This assertion
is very true. Vernacular cultures in India are very often markers of caste
location. Any person who speaks Konkani will know that to speak Konkani is to
give away one’s caste. If one wants to speak the so-called ‘perfect Konkani’
one has to speak like a Saraswat brahmin. The problem is, given that Saraswat
speech is the result of a complete immersion in a sub-culture, it is in fact
difficult to speak this language. If one is able to master this caste dialect,
then this is at the cost of giving up the Konkani of one’s home.When one slips, the mask drops, and one is
almost always embarrassed for it becomes obvious, one was performing the
language rather than living it. In addition, there are numerous stories of
households, both Hindu and Catholic where children correct both parents and
grandparents, telling them, or worse laughing at them, saying “your Konkani is
wrong.” Learning Konkani, is to also learn about caste, to be ashamed about
one’s caste location, to try to imitate the dominant castes, and to fall short,
as some applicants for government jobs have reported. The result is that the only
group that is able to be proud of Konkani is that of the Saraswat Brahmins,
because it is their Konkani alone that is held up as perfect.

A great part of
the Goan population in fact understands this tricky situation vis-à-vis Konkani
which is why they will speak it at home, but, if they are upwardly mobile, avoid
it outside. They prefer to use English in public engagements outside those in
the marketplace. Because, while English and its cultures may have class
markings, they are both as yet largely free of markings of caste. It is for
this reason that English is preferred by a large segment of our population.

The issue of
culture also came up with Dr. Varsha Ayyar, the speaker who inaugurated the
Ambedkar Memorial Lectures. Dalits do not celebrate their culture, she said.
They seek to liberate themselves from the culture which traps them in a
definite social location. But it is different with the bahujans and “their” culture.
This fact was also observed by one of the participants in the discussions
subsequent to the first lecture. A Dalit activist composed a question in the
form of a Marathi poem, asking “In this country the Brahmin acknowledge that
they are Brahmin, the Kshatriya that they are Kshatriya, even the Ati-Shudra
that they are Ati-Shudra. In this country it is only the Shudra who refuse to
acknowledge who they are. What do we do with the Shudra?”

What he meant
was that rather than recognise that it is brahmanical culture that oppresses
them and those below them, the Shudra embrace this culture that not only
restricts their own mobility, but becomes the basis for the persecution of
other marginalised groups in the country.

Listening to
this poem and the discussion that ensued various pennies dropped in my head. To
begin with, I realised with a start how the movement against English and in
support of the Indian languages is led by those who see themselves as bahujan
leaders in Goa. It also became clear why, so often, Hindu bahujan leaders who
should reach out to their Catholic bahujan brethren often use Hindu nationalist
imagery that pushes the Catholics away.

The problem is
not only with the Hindu bahujan, however. The Catholic bahujan too fail to
raise questions of caste, preferring to ignore the pink elephant in the room in
the hope that it will go away. Rather than raise questions of caste and
fracture the consensus that has caused so much misery in Goa since at least its
integration into India, they grasp at straws. Therefore, rather than say that
Devanagari currently operates as a tool of brahmanical domination in India,
rather than say that state-supported Konkani is a tool of caste-based
oppression they suggest that they are genetically unable to understand the
script and dialect. In doing so, they aggravate the pro-Hindutva bahujan
leaders, and also waltz straight into the arms of the upper-caste Catholic
leaders who excel at playing second fiddle to the leaders among the Hindu upper-castes.

One strain of
Dalit thought makes it very clear that if India is to emerge out of the morass
of daily persecution that marks the lives of so many of the people in it, a
good portion of Indian culture itself will have to be destroyed. There is no
point being nostalgic about a poison that kills. English must be acclaimed
because it is one way to check the caste logics that lurk so close to the
surface of vernacular languages.

As a certain
Jewish leader so many centuries ago once remarked, “Man was made for the
Sabbath, not the Sabbath for man.” Thus, let Indians, and Goans, craft their
own culture in new egalitarian forms, and not be enslaved to horrific forms of
the past.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The lastcouple
of columns of the Itinerant have explored the meaning of the Indo-Portuguese
and the significance of what is held under this term. These columns challenged
the conception that Indo-Portuguese art should be seen as something from the
past with nothing to offer us in the present or the future. On the contrary, a
public collection of the art of the Indo-Portuguese stands to deepen the
aesthetic vocabulary of both artists as well as lay individuals living in the
state. It is this argument that this column will concern itself with.

If
one walks into the shops and spaces that offer tourists souvenirs from Goa one
realises that by and large these products fall into the category of what one
would call folk art. Products made from shells, terracotta, coir, simple
crochet, they are marked by a certain simplicity, not particularly nuanced in
their artistic rendition, nor do they draw from a particularly deep cultural
pool. One may be tempted to suggest that this is all one can produce with these
materials, such as the coconut, but this is where I would like to differ and
offer contrary examples.

In
the course of my time in Lisbon, I had the opportunity to come across a couple
of works of art made from the coconut shell. Both of these works are
particularly vivid in my mind. One of these objects was a ciborium; that is the
container that holds the consecrated communion wafers, while the other was a
chalice. Both these objects often have a similar structure, consisting of a
central bowl that is fitted to a footed stem. A ciborium normally contains a
cover that fits tightly over the rim of the bowl. In both these cases the
central bowl was made of the finely finished shell of the coconut. Both these
bowls were fitted on the silver stands, and the ciborium had a smart silver
cover. Additionally, the ciborium had four silver medallions spaced evenly
along the outer diameter of the bowl.

When
I first saw these works, I was completely awed by the manner in which the
‘humble’ coconut shell had been converted into a work of the high baroque and
elevated into an object for the use of the Catholic cult. Given that I was able
to encounter one of these pieces rather often, it soon became so commonplace
for me to assume that combining a precious metal with coconut shell was a
fairly obvious design possibility. Were one of the many museums in the state to
decide to prosecute a project that would amass Indo-Portuguese art in all its
variety, there would be without doubt a host of other such objects that would
offer local artists, artisans patrons of art, a plethora of ideas in which to
work with materials that are still commonly available.

It is not merely artists
and artisans who can benefit from such a deepening of their references, but indeed
patrons of art as well. The success of most of the great movements of art
benefitted substantially from the demands of a cultured network of patrons.
Indeed, in the case of the Indo-Portuguese these patrons ranged not only from
European nobility and men of wealth, but notables from all across the Indian
ocean world. It was this patronage that made for the particularly interesting
production of Indo-Portuguese art. In addition to the educational aspect that
such a collection would have, it would also allow us to also host curators that
would be able to encourage conversations between contemporary works with works
from our past.

It
seems obvious enough that a reclamation of the Indo-Portuguese should begin
post-haste.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Rather than
presenting the news, Rajdeep Sardesai has very recently actually been in the
news on two rather different occasions. The first occasion was when Sardesai
got into a scuffle with some of Modi’s supporters when the Prime Minister was
in New York. In the video war that followed, Sardesai was first seen as being
beaten by the Hindu nationalist, then as having started the scuffle, and
finally as having been forced to respond violently to the nationalist’s heckling.
Regardless of the reasons for the scuffle, or its context, however, Sardesai
almost instantly became the poster boy for Indian secular liberals across the
world. Vociferous opponents of the BJP, Hindu nationalism and Modi, they
cheered Sardesai and used the episode to reflect on the rowdy ways of Hindu
nationalists.

The second
occasion, however, saw the same Rajdeep Sardesai being booed for being
casteist. His sin this time round was a tweet where he confessed to “Saraswat
pride” at seeing two members of his Saraswat caste being included in the prime
minister’s cabinet. In response to the outrage that rained on him, Sardesai
sought to explain himself in an oped in the Hindustan Times, and subsequently in the Navhind
Times. This only complicated matters further, since what could have been
excused as a momentary lapse was now justified rather elaborately.

How does one
explain this swing from being the archetypical secular liberal to unrepentant
casteist in the space of a few months? The sad truth is that all too often what
Sardesai demonstrated more recently is not an uncommon feature of the Indian
secular liberal.

Indian secular
liberalism is based on caste and largely the ideological position of anglicised
upper caste Indians. One need go no further to unearth this relationship
between caste and secularism than to look at Nehru, the revered figure of
Indian secularism. Often referred to as Pandit Nehru, where did this title of
Pandit come from? Nehru was a graduate, but the title of Pandit came not from his
graduation in Western education, nor from any knowledge of the Sanskrit texts.
The title is one inherited from his caste location as a Kashmiri Pandit. Nehru
may have been an unrepentant dismisser of Hindu religiosity, but that did not
stop him from claiming his brahmin privilege and assume a right to leadership
that supposedly came with his heritage.

Nehruvian
secularism was the product not merely of one man, but a social milieu that
gathered around Nehru and formed the core of the anti-imperial nationalist
struggle. Referred to as the ‘nationalist class’ by Partha Chatterjee, this was
a group that in some ways was secular. They were secular in the sense that they
did not necessarily find their spouses within their natal caste groups, nor did
they follow other traditional caste rules. They did not do so, largely because
they did not have to. Theirs was an anglicised milieu and they had in fact
formed a sub-caste, or jati, of their
own. This was the group that controlled power in the Centre through the initial
decades of Indian independence.

The fact of the
matter is that group was composed of people like Pandit Nehru, anglicised
segments of already dominant caste groups. The nationalist class was not averse
to recruiting people and accommodating them in various governmental
institutions. However, the route to this recruitment depended critically on the
privileges available to dominant groups in India. This meant the ability to be
educated in one of the “good” schools in India, gain a degree in Oxford,
Cambridge, where one gained access to scions of these families. These options
are technically open to all, and yet as is the reality of this country, were,
and are available largely to privileged segments of dominant caste groups.
Rajdeep Sardesai, with his dominant caste background, and his privileged education
is a natural member of the nationalist class jati.

One would not
appreciate how this nationalist class can be seen as a jati if one has the standard static notion of India and its culture.
One has to recognise that like culture, caste is not static, but dynamic and
constantly changing. Take, for example, the fact that the Gaud Saraswat caste
that we today assume to be an ancient caste was in fact produced through a
caste unity movement that commenced in the latter part of the nineteenth
century. This caste movement gathered together various jati like Bardezkars, Bhanavlikars, Pednekars, Kudaldeshkars and
Sasthikars on the one hand, and Smartha and Vaishnava sampraday on the other, to form one Gaud Saraswat caste. This
movement took a good amount of effort and often ran counter to the wishes of
the Swamis of the various sampraday,
as well as orthodox elements within these jati. When upper castes like Sardesai refer to themselves as progressive, they are
not necessarily referring to a tradition of egalitarianism, but rather to their
caste histories where some radicals reading the need of the times stop
following caste laws and began to westernise themselves. As Sardesai’s tweet
and subsequent article demonstrate, none of this meant that they gave up caste.
What happened was that caste was now masked under a superficial veneer of
westernised behaviour, like eating meat, not fulfilling brahmanical Hindu
religious rituals, crossing the waters. In other words, they merely produced
new rules for their caste groups.

New jati, therefore, are constantly being
born, and if the Gaud Saraswat caste was born in the context of creating
opportunities in colonial Bombay, the nationalist class is a jati that was formed through the process
of fighting off the British. The idea of a single nation was the idea of this jati and they had to fight off rival
claims from the princes and other caste groups. These latter groups were more
interested in maintaining spheres of influence. While the princes were
dismissed through democratic rhetoric, the dominant castes from various regions
were accommodated through the process of the linguistic reorganisation of
States. This process allowed for the regional hegemony of these caste groups by
recognising their dialects as the official languages of the states where they
dominated, while the Nehruvian elite dominated the centre with their secular
talk of “unity in diversity”.

Unity in Diversity, with Hinduism on top

The Indian
nation is not an ancient primordial entity. It is a production of the Indian
nationalists held together by the force of the post-colonial state of India and
the logic of Hindutva. Given that the maintenance of the Indian nation was
always under threat from the dominant castes of various regions, the
nationalist class always existed in some tension with the regional dominant castes.
As yet unfamiliar with the options that anglicisization could bring, these
regional castes stuck to the regional identities that brought them power. If
they cooperated together, it was because they recognised that Hindutva is what
allows for dominant brahmanised castes to assert their dominance in the various
Indian states. As such, as long as their assertions of caste, regional and
religious identity did not challenge the integrity of the Indian state, these
were always treated with some amount of condescension by the nationalist class.
It was only if these regional groups got too strident in their assertions that
the Indian state got nasty.

If one looks at
the longer videos of Sardesai interviewing those who had come to support Modi
in New York, one will recognise instantly the condescending manner in which
Sardesai did not so much talk to these supporters, as much as he talked down to
them. This is the condescension that the members of the nationalist class
reserve for those that do not buy their version of secularism. Rather than see
the assertions of caste, and religion as a way in which segments of the Indian
population are trying to assert power, the secular liberal sees this as the
product of dull minds who are unable to grasp the sublime truths and value of
secularism. Indeed, Hindutva in its current form is the political response of the non-anglicised regional dominant castes to the secularism of the largely Hindu Nehruvian elite. Had the Nehruvian secularists been honest about the fact that their
version of secularism was itself limited by their social location, that it was
also a casteist project, then perhaps the project of Indian secularism would
have met with greater success.

The two episodes
that got Rajdeep Sardesai in the news are not antithetical to each other. In
fact, they are but two sides of the same coin.

About Me

Itinerant mendicant captures two aspects of my life perfectly. My educational formation has seen me traverse various terrains, geographical as well as academic. After a Bachelor's in law from the National Law School of India, I worked for a while in the environmental and developmental sector. After a Master's in the Sociology of Law, I obtained a Doctorate in Anthropology in Lisbon for my study of the citizenship experience of Goan Catholics. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon, but continue to shuttle between Lisbon and Goa.
I see myself as a mendicant not only because so many of my voyages have been funded by scholarships and grants but because I will accept almost any offer for sensorial and intellectual stimulation, and thank the donor for it.
This blog operates as an archive of my writings in the popular press.